Showing posts with label Emotion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emotion. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A Brain of Two Halves
WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and empathic? According to popular psychology you're one or the other, and it's all down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left or the intuitive, artistic right.
It's a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.
The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy. These "split-brain" patients showed some strikingly odd responses to information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the left brain, and vice versa.
For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain experiment:
Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion's share of the work recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided bias in our judgement of faces.
Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling, chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent.
It isn't just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional state.
You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia, vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a "half smile", lifting one corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.
Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an impossible maths puzzle.
Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it appears, is alive and well.
It's a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.
The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy. These "split-brain" patients showed some strikingly odd responses to information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the left brain, and vice versa.
For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain experiment:
Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion's share of the work recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided bias in our judgement of faces.
Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling, chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent.
It isn't just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional state.
You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia, vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a "half smile", lifting one corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.
Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an impossible maths puzzle.
Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it appears, is alive and well.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Emotions - Cognitive Psychology & Science
New Scientist vol 123 issue 1678 - 19 August 89
The importance of being emotional: Recent theories in cognitive psychology allow us to understand that emotions are not especially irrational. Rather, they are important in the management of our goals and actions
WE ARE ambivalent about our emotions. Sometimes they seem to make us think in a distorted way. To say that someone is being emotional is to be insulting. But on the other hand, we regard emotions as important to our humanity. To be without them would be less than human.
This ambivalence is depicted in science fiction. Mr Spock of Star Trek is superintelligent and without emotion. But he is a lonely figure - not the person to identify with as one boldly goes across the universe. So the question is, do emotions impede rationality? If we were fully rational, would we need them? Would an intelligent being from another planet have emotions? Would a robot? Are emotions an important part of being human? And if so, how? Perhaps science can help to answer such questions. Most important here has been the work of Charles Darwin. His book published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, touches on a fundamental dilemma about the nature of emotions, and the way we view them.
Darwin thought of emotional expressions as vestiges of patterns of action that once were useful, but are so no longer. Earlier studies of anatomical vestiges had provided evidence for evolution. We have, for instance, a row of vertebrae at the base of our spine which indicate that our ancestors had tails. Now that we are tail-less, these bones have no function. It is the same with emotional expressions, Darwin argued. He wrote that their study 'confirms to a certain limited extent the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form'.
With this theory, Darwin gave support, perhaps unintentionally, to an intuition already strong in Western culture, that emotions are subverters of reason, matters for infants and beasts, but scarcely to be approved of in adult humans.
At the same time, he admitted that emotional expressions are important for human welfare. He stopped short of saying that they have functions - that is, that they have evolved because they are adaptive in some way. To do so would have contradicted his observation that many emotional expressions are not functional in many circumstances. He collected evidence of activity that was superfluous to efficient action: tears that do not serve to lubricate the eyes, hair that stands on end, adding nothing to the skill of an attack, laughter that seems not to improve the execution of any task. He would have been fascinated by the expressions of people talking on the telephone.
So we are left with a problem: how can emotions be important, when their expressions can happen whether or not they serve any purpose, and sometimes seem irrational? Darwin, of course, was primarily interested in expressions of emotion as evidence for evolution. But the issues he explored point to another direction which helps to resolve the paradox. It is this: mammals and birds often find themselves in situations where they lack appropriate patterns of behaviour - when they are not fully adapted to an environment that has changed or when no habit or instinct fits a situation. Could emotions be important as part of the solution to the problem of what to do at these junctures? Could they be useful because they prompt us towards certain types of action when perhaps we should do something, but lack a well-adapted way of acting? Over the past 20 years or so, cognitive psychologists have begun to answer 'Yes' to such questions. They have studied phenomena of the kind that Darwin described, but perhaps because they no longer need to argue as staunchly as he did for the theory of evolution, they have come to a conclusion more appropriate to understanding emotions themselves. It is that emotions are not just vestiges of an infantile and bestial history. They are important now in our lives, in the everyday management of action.
The issue turns out to be a very general one. It would apply not just to us, but also to Martians, or to general-purpose robots. It would apply to any intelligent being that makes new goals and plans as it goes along, if that being had only imperfect knowledge and other limitations of its resources, if it had a number of goals that were not always mutually consistent, if it needed to cooperate with others.
Ronald de Sousa, in The Rationality of Emotion, puts the problem like this: we are neither completely determinate machines, nor angels with pure and rational wills. We are somewhere in between. Let me enlarge on this idea.
We can think of insects as being equipped with patterns of action shaped by natural selection for their particular form of life, and perhaps for particular patterns of interaction with other members of their species. Insects have so-called fixed action patterns that are triggered by stimuli, and this arrangement works well for them. An insect can be thought of as a little automaton, programmed by genetics. These action patterns can be directed in various ways, but the basic patterns are wired in. Where the insect does learn something - for instance, where an object is - it is mainly by a process in which the relevant information is inserted in slots that accept these data. Similarly, although we may think a swarm of bees seems 'angry', this may be an inappropriate assumption. More probably, the members of the swarm are displaying action patterns that have been triggered off. In general, insects do not have much need for emotions.
By a comparable argument, there is even less question of whether present types of robot have emotions. The reason is that a robot is an engineering means of achieving just one goal at a time. Like many such solutions, it requires the world to be simplified somewhat. The wheel was certainly a good idea, but to work properly it has needed parts of the Earth's surface to be made hard and flat. Similarly, robots work well, but only in the simplified situation for which they are designed, perhaps to assemble a part of a car. In their world, nothing unexpected happens. They can be programmed fully and rationally, precisely because they must fulfil one single function at a time, in a known and simplified environment.
We are not insects or robots - but neither are we gods. If we were, we would be all knowing, all seeing, omnipotent. For such beings, nothing unexpected could happen. Everything would be subordinated to a grand design, and a rational will. Instead, we are somewhere in between, neither automata nor omnipotent beings. We act with a degree of voluntariness and rationality, but because we are not all knowing our actions often have consequences we do not anticipate. Moreover, we have not one grand design, but many rather smaller goals, which are not always clear cut or compatible with each other. Sometimes when we act in pursuit of one of them, something happens that is relevant to another. And, rather than being like ants whose interactions with other ants are programmed, people make arrangements in the tasks that they share with others, and these may turn our differently from any one person's plans.
To understand emotions, we need to know when and where we tend to experience them. In fact, we tend to experience them at just the points that happen frequently to higher animals including humans, but hardly ever to automata or gods. They arise when something unexpected happens, a situation to which we are not fully adapted, an event at which two different concerns clash, or when someone else does something more or less than we expected.
So we need some mechanism that can do three things. First, it must be able to handle interruptions and potential interruptions. It must signal when something urgent happens, or something that makes it necessary to abandon a plan, or when we must respond to some person with whom we have joint interests. At the same time, if we are doing something important to us, this same mechanism should screen out events of lower priority, and help us to continue with what we are doing.
Secondly, when a potential interruption does arise, the mechanism must be able to change priorities, and manage the problem of whether and how we should make a transition from one activity to another.
Thirdly, because some events are both important and unanticipated, we might want to reprogram ourselves in the light of whatever new knowledge we have acquired as a result of these events. This would be learning of a kind that is not just taking on specific data, but which involves making new plans or modifying existing goals. The mechanism must allow us to concentrate on reprogramming ourselves, even though the urgency of the moment has passed.
These functions correspond rather closely to what happens with emotions. Emotions happen when certain events affect our goals. Here we need to distinguish between emotions and moods. Emotions arise suddenly, and they last for seconds or minutes. Moods are emotional states that may be more vague, and they last for hours or days. The distinction between emotions and moods is like that between two types of muscular activity: contractions, which change the position of a limb, and muscle tone, which maintains posture. Discrete emotions are concerned with changing something, and moods with maintaining something.
Emotions have five salient characteristics: first, they usually include an involuntary urge to act; secondly, there is often some bodily perturbation; thirdly, there is usually distinctive conscious feeling; fourthly, recognisable expressions of emotion, such as smiling or frowning, occur; and fifthly, thoughts may come to mind involuntarily and may reverberate for some time. We can explain these five characteristics by the idea that emotions manage transitions, or potential transitions, between different goals and plans.
Focusing on the first of these characteristics, most theorists now agree that emotion must be understood in relation to action. Emotions involve readiness and involuntary predispositions to act. Philip Johnson-Laird, of the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, and I have devised a cognitive theory to explain some of these issues. We propose that all our various emotions are based on just a few distinctive mental states that go with readiness for action, and that each is set off when we evaluate an event in relation to our goals.
We suggest that events are evaluated, consciously or unconsciously, in terms of the following categories: the achievement of minor goals in solving problems as they arise; the loss of a goal; the frustration of a plan or goal by some person or circumstance; a conflict of goals including conflict with a goal of self-preservation; and the perception that something or someone is noxious. Each evaluation produces a mental state that is a basic emotion. The nearest English terms are happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust.
If we are happy, we are ready to keep going with what we were doing, and we may adopt expressions such as smiling. If sad, we become ready to do nothing for a while, perhaps hoping to be rescued, or hoping to change our plans. Perhaps we cry. If angry, we prepare to make redress of some kind. If frightened, we may freeze, or prepare to flee, or perhaps even to fight. If disgusted, or experiencing the interpersonal form of disgust known as hatred, we withdraw and may sneer and belittle the person concerned.
The mechanism is not that of the fixed action pattern - the stereotyped behaviours performed by some animals in some situation. In a changeable environment, we could not be properly programmed in advance. But neither do we depend solely on ordinary thinking, which is slow and prone to error - in any case, we seldom have the necessary knowledge to come to a rational conclusion. Instead, evolution seems to have provided us with an intermediate mechanism that involves being able, at each juncture, to make ready one of several small repertoires of action.
The mechanism must enable us to evaluate a situation, to interrupt what we are doing, and to move towards actions that are appropriate to a recurring type of juncture. The mechanism simplifies the choices available to us. Then, once the moment of what to do immediately is passed, the same mechanism may prolong the state into a mood - a period in which we may think consciously about what has happened, and plan what to do next.
Although there are just five basic emotions, there is an indefinite number of specific emotions, each made up of the basic emotions plus information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed. So being in love is a kind of happiness directed towards another person, with sexual implications. Jealousy, on the other hand, is based either on hatred or perhaps on anger, and caused by a possibility of being displaced from a love relationship by a third person. Johnson-Laird and I believe that the semantics of nearly 600 English words for emotions can be understood in this way.
We propose that it has been cognitively efficient for people to be ready to evaluate events in these five basic ways, and that evolution has selected for these states. When events evoke any one of the five, appropriate habits and any genetically programmed instincts are made ready.
Take, for example, the initiation of fear: let us say that we use 'fear' for a discrete emotion, and 'anxiety' when it is prolonged into a mood. Some part of the whole cognitive system - everything that enables us to perceive and think - detects a danger. There may be no single thing to do that is best, no fixed action pattern. But on the other hand there is usually neither the time nor knowledge to think through the best course of action. So evolution has equipped us with an intermediate mechanism based on an emotion. The recognition of a danger, in relation to the concerns about ourselves that we have, triggers a state of fear which summons, as it were, a small suite of action patterns derived from genes and habit.
As Jeffrey Gray of the Institute of Psychiatry in London has proposed, the actions that are prompted include stopping what we were doing when we become fearful or anxious. We become ready to freeze, to flee or perhaps to fight. We check what we have done carefully. We monitor the environment assiduously, and we perhaps call on any special training we may have for the situation in question. One thing is certain: in an emergency or a fight, there is not much time to think and almost no chance that we would arrive at the best, 'god's eye', solution anyway. So instead we have this set of more general promptings that have apparently been successful in evolution.
What about the second characteristic - that emotions are often accompanied by bodily perturbations? We can probably understand this best by thinking that, just as action patterns are loaded in readiness, so too are the physiological mechanisms necessary for their support. So, if we may need to fight or run, the heart starts to pump faster, and the body shifts resources away from activities that can be suspended, such as digestion, towards the muscles. This kind of process is the best we can propose at present, but it is not fully satisfactory. It makes a poor showing, for instance, in explaining why we blush when we are embarrassed and find ourselves the focus of unwelcome attention.
The third characteristic is that each emotion also has a distinctive conscious feeling. Johnson-Laird and I think of it in terms of the emotion signal reaching the topmost module of the cognitive system, where the results of some of the processes become conscious. The system then interprets the signal consciously in a particular way - as a feeling of happiness, sadness or anger, say. We believe that the signal indicates that emotions are a kind of communication. In our conscious awareness of them, they are communications to ourselves. The distinctiveness of each emotion means that we can recognise it and then talk about it with other people, so allowing us to reach understandings that our animal ancestors could not. Hence our fascination with cultural elaborations of ideas about emotions in conversation, in novels and in plays.
According to this theory, emotions depend on processes that monitor our goals all the time, to assess whether they are contributing to an ongoing plan. From these monitoring processes, simple signals are sent out whenever progress toward any goal changes substantially, for better or worse. Like an alarm bell, the signal indicates that something has happened that demands attention. It also tells us what kind of thing the event is. But in itself, the simple signal does not say what caused it, nor exactly what to do about it.
One clue suggesting that there are several distinct signals of emotion is that emotions and moods sometimes happen without there being any meaning attached to them. In other words, they may occur simply as 'feelings' without necessarily having any particular content. Although this happens rarely, it is very significant. For instance, someone might feel - in Wordsworth's words - 'surprised by joy': the emotion of happiness may arise for reasons that no one can describe. In the same way, people sometimes suffer from so-called free-floating anxiety, a sense of utter dread that is nameless. They are unable to say what it is that they fear. Moreover, certain drugs, including popular illegal ones as well as those used as tranquillisers and antidepressants, can alter moods without changing events in the outside world. Such drugs act to induce a basic mood state, or alter its intensity. They further indicate that these states are probably based on distinctive physiological mechanisms involving hormones, peptides and neural pathways.
The signal of an emotion is simple and, in evolutionary terms, old. Its detailed structure is of no meaningful significance to the system, because the signal merely switches some cognitive functions on and others off, producing its distinctive conscious feeling. We call such signals nonpropositional. Each induces one of the five basic states of emotion, and each can happen in a free-floating way.
Usually, however, the nonpropositional emotion signal is accompanied by what we call propositional information, and the feeling is closely bound to information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed, or what we might do about it. Some emotions - for instance, those that involve some evaluation of the self, such as guilt, remorse and envy - cannot happen in a free-floating way because some aspect of the reason why they occur must be conscious. So, although we may suffer free-floating anxiety, a basic emotion of fear, without knowing why, we cannot feel embarrassed without knowing something about why. Embarrassment is fear or anxiety that includes the knowledge that we are the focus of attention.
As to the fourth salient characteristic, as well as being communications to ourselves, emotions also communicate to others. Many animals, including humans, communicate happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust to each other principally by expressions and gestures. Vocal communications of fear even have a special name in the study of animal behaviour - alarm calls. We know, too, that human facial expressions of these five basic emotions are recognisable across all the cultures that have been studied, and recent research also indicates that each emotion produces a different constellation of physiological effects.
The shape of my eyebrows when I frown does not say what I am angry about, nor does a look of sadness indicate what has been lost. But when communicated, such signals may have the effect of propagating an emotion within the cognitive system of the person receiving it. In empathy, the emotion is the same as that of the sender. When the emotion expressed is anger, it may have a complementary effect on someone else, inducing fear, or an escalatory effect, making the other person angry too. So emotion signals between people, like their internal counterparts, are simple. They are like a police or ambulance siren: the siren does not tell you what has happened, but if you are driving, it prompts you towards a simple action, to make way for the vehicle to pass.
The fifth salient characteristic of emotions is that we may find thoughts coming to mind that are difficult to stop, especially when emotions are prolonged into moods. So, when we are in love, we think obsessively about the loved one. If sad, we may not be able to get what happened out of mind. If anxious, we find it hard to do anything else except worry about what may happen and how we could make ourselves safe. If angry, we may plot revenge - indeed, some people may shape large parts of their lives around such plans.
Such driven patterns of thought, with their conscious feelings of emotion, indicate that we may enter into a maintained mood after the rapid interruption by the emotion. Moods of this kind seem to concentrate the attention, to ensure that we think about making sense of what has happened, construct new plans about what to do about it, and perhaps modify our goals in relation to the new events.
So emotions are not just useless vestiges of our evolutionary past. They remain important in human thinking about the world because action is typically influenced by many simultaneous goals, is directed without complete mental models of the world and involves coordination with other people. Because the world is not fully predictable, and because conflicting goals cannot always be reconciled either with ourselves or between people, human action can hardly ever be perfectly rational. So to argue that emotions are irrational, as Plato did, for instance, misses an important point: rational solutions to problems of human action are rarely possible. Emotions help us to act in a world that can be only imperfectly known. Then, where something has not gone as expected, a change in readiness to act may be followed by a longer lasting mental preoccupation in which we can concentrate on reprogramming the way we think about our lives.
These properties of emotions are a biological and cognitive solution to the problems of managing goals and plans. Some solution to these problems would be necessary for any intelligent being capable of planning actions in an imperfectly knowable world.
Keith Oatley is professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow and currently president of the psychology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This article is adapted from a British Association Lecture he gave at the first Edinburgh Science Festival in April 1989.
Further reading Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird, 'Towards a cognitive theory of emotions', Cognition and Emotions, vol 1, p 29.
The importance of being emotional: Recent theories in cognitive psychology allow us to understand that emotions are not especially irrational. Rather, they are important in the management of our goals and actions
WE ARE ambivalent about our emotions. Sometimes they seem to make us think in a distorted way. To say that someone is being emotional is to be insulting. But on the other hand, we regard emotions as important to our humanity. To be without them would be less than human.
This ambivalence is depicted in science fiction. Mr Spock of Star Trek is superintelligent and without emotion. But he is a lonely figure - not the person to identify with as one boldly goes across the universe. So the question is, do emotions impede rationality? If we were fully rational, would we need them? Would an intelligent being from another planet have emotions? Would a robot? Are emotions an important part of being human? And if so, how? Perhaps science can help to answer such questions. Most important here has been the work of Charles Darwin. His book published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, touches on a fundamental dilemma about the nature of emotions, and the way we view them.
Darwin thought of emotional expressions as vestiges of patterns of action that once were useful, but are so no longer. Earlier studies of anatomical vestiges had provided evidence for evolution. We have, for instance, a row of vertebrae at the base of our spine which indicate that our ancestors had tails. Now that we are tail-less, these bones have no function. It is the same with emotional expressions, Darwin argued. He wrote that their study 'confirms to a certain limited extent the conclusion that man is derived from some lower animal form'.
With this theory, Darwin gave support, perhaps unintentionally, to an intuition already strong in Western culture, that emotions are subverters of reason, matters for infants and beasts, but scarcely to be approved of in adult humans.
At the same time, he admitted that emotional expressions are important for human welfare. He stopped short of saying that they have functions - that is, that they have evolved because they are adaptive in some way. To do so would have contradicted his observation that many emotional expressions are not functional in many circumstances. He collected evidence of activity that was superfluous to efficient action: tears that do not serve to lubricate the eyes, hair that stands on end, adding nothing to the skill of an attack, laughter that seems not to improve the execution of any task. He would have been fascinated by the expressions of people talking on the telephone.
So we are left with a problem: how can emotions be important, when their expressions can happen whether or not they serve any purpose, and sometimes seem irrational? Darwin, of course, was primarily interested in expressions of emotion as evidence for evolution. But the issues he explored point to another direction which helps to resolve the paradox. It is this: mammals and birds often find themselves in situations where they lack appropriate patterns of behaviour - when they are not fully adapted to an environment that has changed or when no habit or instinct fits a situation. Could emotions be important as part of the solution to the problem of what to do at these junctures? Could they be useful because they prompt us towards certain types of action when perhaps we should do something, but lack a well-adapted way of acting? Over the past 20 years or so, cognitive psychologists have begun to answer 'Yes' to such questions. They have studied phenomena of the kind that Darwin described, but perhaps because they no longer need to argue as staunchly as he did for the theory of evolution, they have come to a conclusion more appropriate to understanding emotions themselves. It is that emotions are not just vestiges of an infantile and bestial history. They are important now in our lives, in the everyday management of action.
The issue turns out to be a very general one. It would apply not just to us, but also to Martians, or to general-purpose robots. It would apply to any intelligent being that makes new goals and plans as it goes along, if that being had only imperfect knowledge and other limitations of its resources, if it had a number of goals that were not always mutually consistent, if it needed to cooperate with others.
Ronald de Sousa, in The Rationality of Emotion, puts the problem like this: we are neither completely determinate machines, nor angels with pure and rational wills. We are somewhere in between. Let me enlarge on this idea.
We can think of insects as being equipped with patterns of action shaped by natural selection for their particular form of life, and perhaps for particular patterns of interaction with other members of their species. Insects have so-called fixed action patterns that are triggered by stimuli, and this arrangement works well for them. An insect can be thought of as a little automaton, programmed by genetics. These action patterns can be directed in various ways, but the basic patterns are wired in. Where the insect does learn something - for instance, where an object is - it is mainly by a process in which the relevant information is inserted in slots that accept these data. Similarly, although we may think a swarm of bees seems 'angry', this may be an inappropriate assumption. More probably, the members of the swarm are displaying action patterns that have been triggered off. In general, insects do not have much need for emotions.
By a comparable argument, there is even less question of whether present types of robot have emotions. The reason is that a robot is an engineering means of achieving just one goal at a time. Like many such solutions, it requires the world to be simplified somewhat. The wheel was certainly a good idea, but to work properly it has needed parts of the Earth's surface to be made hard and flat. Similarly, robots work well, but only in the simplified situation for which they are designed, perhaps to assemble a part of a car. In their world, nothing unexpected happens. They can be programmed fully and rationally, precisely because they must fulfil one single function at a time, in a known and simplified environment.
We are not insects or robots - but neither are we gods. If we were, we would be all knowing, all seeing, omnipotent. For such beings, nothing unexpected could happen. Everything would be subordinated to a grand design, and a rational will. Instead, we are somewhere in between, neither automata nor omnipotent beings. We act with a degree of voluntariness and rationality, but because we are not all knowing our actions often have consequences we do not anticipate. Moreover, we have not one grand design, but many rather smaller goals, which are not always clear cut or compatible with each other. Sometimes when we act in pursuit of one of them, something happens that is relevant to another. And, rather than being like ants whose interactions with other ants are programmed, people make arrangements in the tasks that they share with others, and these may turn our differently from any one person's plans.
To understand emotions, we need to know when and where we tend to experience them. In fact, we tend to experience them at just the points that happen frequently to higher animals including humans, but hardly ever to automata or gods. They arise when something unexpected happens, a situation to which we are not fully adapted, an event at which two different concerns clash, or when someone else does something more or less than we expected.
So we need some mechanism that can do three things. First, it must be able to handle interruptions and potential interruptions. It must signal when something urgent happens, or something that makes it necessary to abandon a plan, or when we must respond to some person with whom we have joint interests. At the same time, if we are doing something important to us, this same mechanism should screen out events of lower priority, and help us to continue with what we are doing.
Secondly, when a potential interruption does arise, the mechanism must be able to change priorities, and manage the problem of whether and how we should make a transition from one activity to another.
Thirdly, because some events are both important and unanticipated, we might want to reprogram ourselves in the light of whatever new knowledge we have acquired as a result of these events. This would be learning of a kind that is not just taking on specific data, but which involves making new plans or modifying existing goals. The mechanism must allow us to concentrate on reprogramming ourselves, even though the urgency of the moment has passed.
These functions correspond rather closely to what happens with emotions. Emotions happen when certain events affect our goals. Here we need to distinguish between emotions and moods. Emotions arise suddenly, and they last for seconds or minutes. Moods are emotional states that may be more vague, and they last for hours or days. The distinction between emotions and moods is like that between two types of muscular activity: contractions, which change the position of a limb, and muscle tone, which maintains posture. Discrete emotions are concerned with changing something, and moods with maintaining something.
Emotions have five salient characteristics: first, they usually include an involuntary urge to act; secondly, there is often some bodily perturbation; thirdly, there is usually distinctive conscious feeling; fourthly, recognisable expressions of emotion, such as smiling or frowning, occur; and fifthly, thoughts may come to mind involuntarily and may reverberate for some time. We can explain these five characteristics by the idea that emotions manage transitions, or potential transitions, between different goals and plans.
Focusing on the first of these characteristics, most theorists now agree that emotion must be understood in relation to action. Emotions involve readiness and involuntary predispositions to act. Philip Johnson-Laird, of the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, and I have devised a cognitive theory to explain some of these issues. We propose that all our various emotions are based on just a few distinctive mental states that go with readiness for action, and that each is set off when we evaluate an event in relation to our goals.
We suggest that events are evaluated, consciously or unconsciously, in terms of the following categories: the achievement of minor goals in solving problems as they arise; the loss of a goal; the frustration of a plan or goal by some person or circumstance; a conflict of goals including conflict with a goal of self-preservation; and the perception that something or someone is noxious. Each evaluation produces a mental state that is a basic emotion. The nearest English terms are happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust.
If we are happy, we are ready to keep going with what we were doing, and we may adopt expressions such as smiling. If sad, we become ready to do nothing for a while, perhaps hoping to be rescued, or hoping to change our plans. Perhaps we cry. If angry, we prepare to make redress of some kind. If frightened, we may freeze, or prepare to flee, or perhaps even to fight. If disgusted, or experiencing the interpersonal form of disgust known as hatred, we withdraw and may sneer and belittle the person concerned.
The mechanism is not that of the fixed action pattern - the stereotyped behaviours performed by some animals in some situation. In a changeable environment, we could not be properly programmed in advance. But neither do we depend solely on ordinary thinking, which is slow and prone to error - in any case, we seldom have the necessary knowledge to come to a rational conclusion. Instead, evolution seems to have provided us with an intermediate mechanism that involves being able, at each juncture, to make ready one of several small repertoires of action.
The mechanism must enable us to evaluate a situation, to interrupt what we are doing, and to move towards actions that are appropriate to a recurring type of juncture. The mechanism simplifies the choices available to us. Then, once the moment of what to do immediately is passed, the same mechanism may prolong the state into a mood - a period in which we may think consciously about what has happened, and plan what to do next.
Although there are just five basic emotions, there is an indefinite number of specific emotions, each made up of the basic emotions plus information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed. So being in love is a kind of happiness directed towards another person, with sexual implications. Jealousy, on the other hand, is based either on hatred or perhaps on anger, and caused by a possibility of being displaced from a love relationship by a third person. Johnson-Laird and I believe that the semantics of nearly 600 English words for emotions can be understood in this way.
We propose that it has been cognitively efficient for people to be ready to evaluate events in these five basic ways, and that evolution has selected for these states. When events evoke any one of the five, appropriate habits and any genetically programmed instincts are made ready.
Take, for example, the initiation of fear: let us say that we use 'fear' for a discrete emotion, and 'anxiety' when it is prolonged into a mood. Some part of the whole cognitive system - everything that enables us to perceive and think - detects a danger. There may be no single thing to do that is best, no fixed action pattern. But on the other hand there is usually neither the time nor knowledge to think through the best course of action. So evolution has equipped us with an intermediate mechanism based on an emotion. The recognition of a danger, in relation to the concerns about ourselves that we have, triggers a state of fear which summons, as it were, a small suite of action patterns derived from genes and habit.
As Jeffrey Gray of the Institute of Psychiatry in London has proposed, the actions that are prompted include stopping what we were doing when we become fearful or anxious. We become ready to freeze, to flee or perhaps to fight. We check what we have done carefully. We monitor the environment assiduously, and we perhaps call on any special training we may have for the situation in question. One thing is certain: in an emergency or a fight, there is not much time to think and almost no chance that we would arrive at the best, 'god's eye', solution anyway. So instead we have this set of more general promptings that have apparently been successful in evolution.
What about the second characteristic - that emotions are often accompanied by bodily perturbations? We can probably understand this best by thinking that, just as action patterns are loaded in readiness, so too are the physiological mechanisms necessary for their support. So, if we may need to fight or run, the heart starts to pump faster, and the body shifts resources away from activities that can be suspended, such as digestion, towards the muscles. This kind of process is the best we can propose at present, but it is not fully satisfactory. It makes a poor showing, for instance, in explaining why we blush when we are embarrassed and find ourselves the focus of unwelcome attention.
The third characteristic is that each emotion also has a distinctive conscious feeling. Johnson-Laird and I think of it in terms of the emotion signal reaching the topmost module of the cognitive system, where the results of some of the processes become conscious. The system then interprets the signal consciously in a particular way - as a feeling of happiness, sadness or anger, say. We believe that the signal indicates that emotions are a kind of communication. In our conscious awareness of them, they are communications to ourselves. The distinctiveness of each emotion means that we can recognise it and then talk about it with other people, so allowing us to reach understandings that our animal ancestors could not. Hence our fascination with cultural elaborations of ideas about emotions in conversation, in novels and in plays.
According to this theory, emotions depend on processes that monitor our goals all the time, to assess whether they are contributing to an ongoing plan. From these monitoring processes, simple signals are sent out whenever progress toward any goal changes substantially, for better or worse. Like an alarm bell, the signal indicates that something has happened that demands attention. It also tells us what kind of thing the event is. But in itself, the simple signal does not say what caused it, nor exactly what to do about it.
One clue suggesting that there are several distinct signals of emotion is that emotions and moods sometimes happen without there being any meaning attached to them. In other words, they may occur simply as 'feelings' without necessarily having any particular content. Although this happens rarely, it is very significant. For instance, someone might feel - in Wordsworth's words - 'surprised by joy': the emotion of happiness may arise for reasons that no one can describe. In the same way, people sometimes suffer from so-called free-floating anxiety, a sense of utter dread that is nameless. They are unable to say what it is that they fear. Moreover, certain drugs, including popular illegal ones as well as those used as tranquillisers and antidepressants, can alter moods without changing events in the outside world. Such drugs act to induce a basic mood state, or alter its intensity. They further indicate that these states are probably based on distinctive physiological mechanisms involving hormones, peptides and neural pathways.
The signal of an emotion is simple and, in evolutionary terms, old. Its detailed structure is of no meaningful significance to the system, because the signal merely switches some cognitive functions on and others off, producing its distinctive conscious feeling. We call such signals nonpropositional. Each induces one of the five basic states of emotion, and each can happen in a free-floating way.
Usually, however, the nonpropositional emotion signal is accompanied by what we call propositional information, and the feeling is closely bound to information about what caused it, or to whom it is directed, or what we might do about it. Some emotions - for instance, those that involve some evaluation of the self, such as guilt, remorse and envy - cannot happen in a free-floating way because some aspect of the reason why they occur must be conscious. So, although we may suffer free-floating anxiety, a basic emotion of fear, without knowing why, we cannot feel embarrassed without knowing something about why. Embarrassment is fear or anxiety that includes the knowledge that we are the focus of attention.
As to the fourth salient characteristic, as well as being communications to ourselves, emotions also communicate to others. Many animals, including humans, communicate happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust to each other principally by expressions and gestures. Vocal communications of fear even have a special name in the study of animal behaviour - alarm calls. We know, too, that human facial expressions of these five basic emotions are recognisable across all the cultures that have been studied, and recent research also indicates that each emotion produces a different constellation of physiological effects.
The shape of my eyebrows when I frown does not say what I am angry about, nor does a look of sadness indicate what has been lost. But when communicated, such signals may have the effect of propagating an emotion within the cognitive system of the person receiving it. In empathy, the emotion is the same as that of the sender. When the emotion expressed is anger, it may have a complementary effect on someone else, inducing fear, or an escalatory effect, making the other person angry too. So emotion signals between people, like their internal counterparts, are simple. They are like a police or ambulance siren: the siren does not tell you what has happened, but if you are driving, it prompts you towards a simple action, to make way for the vehicle to pass.
The fifth salient characteristic of emotions is that we may find thoughts coming to mind that are difficult to stop, especially when emotions are prolonged into moods. So, when we are in love, we think obsessively about the loved one. If sad, we may not be able to get what happened out of mind. If anxious, we find it hard to do anything else except worry about what may happen and how we could make ourselves safe. If angry, we may plot revenge - indeed, some people may shape large parts of their lives around such plans.
Such driven patterns of thought, with their conscious feelings of emotion, indicate that we may enter into a maintained mood after the rapid interruption by the emotion. Moods of this kind seem to concentrate the attention, to ensure that we think about making sense of what has happened, construct new plans about what to do about it, and perhaps modify our goals in relation to the new events.
So emotions are not just useless vestiges of our evolutionary past. They remain important in human thinking about the world because action is typically influenced by many simultaneous goals, is directed without complete mental models of the world and involves coordination with other people. Because the world is not fully predictable, and because conflicting goals cannot always be reconciled either with ourselves or between people, human action can hardly ever be perfectly rational. So to argue that emotions are irrational, as Plato did, for instance, misses an important point: rational solutions to problems of human action are rarely possible. Emotions help us to act in a world that can be only imperfectly known. Then, where something has not gone as expected, a change in readiness to act may be followed by a longer lasting mental preoccupation in which we can concentrate on reprogramming the way we think about our lives.
These properties of emotions are a biological and cognitive solution to the problems of managing goals and plans. Some solution to these problems would be necessary for any intelligent being capable of planning actions in an imperfectly knowable world.
Keith Oatley is professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow and currently president of the psychology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This article is adapted from a British Association Lecture he gave at the first Edinburgh Science Festival in April 1989.
Further reading Keith Oatley and Philip Johnson-Laird, 'Towards a cognitive theory of emotions', Cognition and Emotions, vol 1, p 29.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Top 10 ways to make better decisions
From issue 2602 of New Scientist magazine, 05 May 2007, page 35-43
Decisions, decisions! Our lives are full of them, from the small and mundane, such as what to wear or eat, to the life-changing, such as whether to get married and to whom, what job to take and how to bring up our children. We jealously guard our right to choose. It is central to our individuality: the very definition of free will. Yet sometimes we make bad decisions that leave us unhappy or full of regret. Can science help?
Making good decisions requires us to balance the seemingly antithetical forces of emotion and rationality. We must be able to predict the future, accurately perceive the present situation, have insight into the minds of others and deal with uncertainty.
Most of us are ignorant of the mental processes that lie behind our decisions, but this has become a hot topic for investigation, and luckily what psychologists and neurobiologists are finding may help us all make better choices. Here we bring together some of their many fascinating discoveries in the New Scientist guide to making up your mind.
1 Don't fear the consequences
Whether it's choosing between a long weekend in Paris or a trip to the ski slopes, a new car versus a bigger house, or even who to marry, almost every decision we make entails predicting the future. In each case we imagine how the outcomes of our choices will make us feel, and what the emotional or "hedonic" consequences of our actions will be. Sensibly, we usually plump for the option that we think will make us the happiest overall.
This "affective forecasting" is fine in theory. The only problem is that we are not very good at it. People routinely overestimate the impact of decision outcomes and life events, both good and bad. We tend to think that winning the lottery will make us happier than it actually will, and that life would be completely unbearable if we were to lose the use of our legs. "The hedonic consequences of most events are less intense and briefer than most people imagine," says psychologist Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University. This is as true for trivial events such as going to a great restaurant, as it is for major ones such as losing a job or a kidney.
A major factor leading us to make bad predictions is "loss aversion" - the belief that a loss will hurt more than a corresponding gain will please. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University has found, for instance, that most people are unwilling to accept a 50:50 bet unless the amount they could win is roughly twice the amount they might lose. So most people would only gamble £5 on the flip of a coin if they could win more than £10. Yet Gilbert and his colleagues have recently shown that while loss aversion affected people's choices, when they did lose they found it much less painful than they had anticipated (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 649). He puts this down to our unsung psychological resilience and our ability to rationalise almost any situation. "We're very good at finding new ways to see the world that make it a better place for us to live in," he says.
So what is a poor affective forecaster supposed to do? Rather than looking inwards and imagining how a given outcome might make you feel, try to find someone who has made the same decision or choice, and see how they felt. Remember also that whatever the future holds, it will probably hurt or please you less than you imagine. Finally, don't always play it safe. The worst might never happen - and if it does you have the psychological resilience to cope.
“Whatever the future holds it will hurt or please you less than you imagine”
2 Go with your gut instincts
It is tempting to think that to make good decisions you need time to systematically weigh up all the pros and cons of various alternatives, but sometimes a snap judgement or instinctive choice is just as good, if not better.
In our everyday lives, we make fast and competent decisions about who to trust and interact with. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov from Princeton University found that we make judgements about a person's trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, likeability and attractiveness within the first 100 milliseconds of seeing a new face. Given longer to look - up to 1 second - the researchers found observers hardly revised their views, they only became more confident in their snap decisions (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592).
Of course, as you get to know someone better you refine your first impressions. It stands to reason that extra information can help you make well-informed, rational decisions. Yet paradoxically, sometimes the more information you have the better off you may be going with your instincts. Information overload can be a problem in all sorts of situations, from choosing a school for your child to picking a holiday destination. At times like these, you may be better off avoiding conscious deliberation and instead leave the decision to your unconscious brain, as research by Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands shows (Science, vol 311, p 1005).
They asked students to choose one of four hypothetical cars, based either on a simple list of four specifications such as mileage and legroom, or a longer list of 12 such features. Some subjects then got a few minutes to think about the alternatives before making their decision, while others had to spend that time solving anagrams. What Dijksterhuis found was that faced with a simple choice, subjects picked better cars if they could think things through. When confronted by a complex decision, however, they became bamboozled and actually made the best choices when they did not consciously analyse the options.
Dijksterhuis and his team found a similar pattern in the real world. When making simple purchases, such as clothes or kitchen accessories, shoppers were happier with their decisions a few weeks later if they had rationally weighed up the alternatives. For more complex purchases such as furniture, however, those who relied on their gut instinct ended up happier. The researchers conclude that this kind of unconscious decision-making can be successfully applied way beyond the shopping mall into areas including politics and management.
But before you throw away your lists of pros and cons, a word of caution. If the choice you face is highly emotive, your instincts may not serve you well. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco this February, Joseph Arvai from Michigan State University in East Lansing described a study in which he and Robyn Wilson from The Ohio State University in Columbus asked people to consider two common risks in US state parks - crime and damage to property by white-tailed deer. When asked to decide which was most urgently in need of management, most people chose crime, even when it was doing far less damage than the deer. Arvai puts this down to the negative emotions that crime incites. "The emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don't factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions," he says.
3 Consider your emotions
You might think that emotions are the enemy of decision-making, but in fact they are integral to it. Our most basic emotions evolved to enable us to make rapid and unconscious choices in situations that threaten our survival. Fear leads to flight or fight, disgust leads to avoidance. Yet the role of emotions in decision-making goes way deeper than these knee-jerk responses. Whenever you make up your mind, your limbic system - the brain's emotional centre - is active. Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has studied people with damage to only the emotional parts of their brains, and found that they were crippled by indecision, unable to make even the most basic choices, such as what to wear or eat. Damasio speculates that this may be because our brains store emotional memories of past choices, which we use to inform present decisions.
Emotions are clearly a crucial component in the neurobiology of choice, but whether they always allow us to make the right decisions is another matter. If you try to make choices under the influence of an emotion it can seriously affect the outcome.
Take anger. Daniel Fessler and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, induced anger in a group of subjects by getting them to write an essay recalling an experience that made them see red. They then got them to play a game in which they were presented with a simple choice: either take a guaranteed $15 payout, or gamble for more with the prospect of gaining nothing. The researchers found that men, but not women, gambled more when they were angry (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 95, p 107).
In another experiment, Fessler and colleague Kevin Haley discovered that angry people were less generous in the ultimatum game - in which one person is given a sum of money and told to share it with an anonymous partner, who must accept the offer otherwise neither gets anything. A third study by Nitika Garg, Jeffrey Inman and Vikas Mittal from the University of Chicago found that angry consumers were more likely to opt for the first thing they were offered rather than considering other alternatives. It seems that anger can make us impetuous, selfish and risk-prone.
Disgust also has some interesting effects. "Disgust protects against contamination," says Fessler. "The initial response is information-gathering, followed by repulsion." That helps explain why in their gambling experiments, Fessler's team found that disgust leads to caution, particularly in women. Disgust also seems to make us more censorious in our moral judgements. Thalia Wheatley from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia, used hypnosis to induce disgust in response to arbitrary words, then asked people to rate the moral status of various actions, including incest between cousins, eating one's dog and bribery. In the most extreme example, people who had read a word that cued disgust went so far as to express moral censure of blameless Dan, a student councillor who was merely organising discussion meetings (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780).
All emotions affect our thinking and motivation, so it may be best to avoid making important decisions under their influence. Yet strangely there is one emotion that seems to help us make good choices. In their study, the Chicago researchers found that sad people took time to consider the various alternatives on offer, and ended up making the best choices. In fact many studies show that depressed people have the most realistic take on the world. Psychologists have even coined a name for it: depressive realism.
4 Play the devil's advocate
Have you ever had an argument with someone about a vexatious issue such as immigration or the death penalty and been frustrated because they only drew on evidence that supported their opinions and conveniently ignored anything to the contrary? This is the ubiquitous confirmation bias. It can be infuriating in others, but we are all susceptible every time we weigh up evidence to guide our decision-making.
If you doubt it, try this famous illustration of the confirmation bias called the Wason card selection task. Four cards are laid out each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. You can see D, A, 2 and 5 and must turn over those cards that will allow you to decide if the following statement is true: "If there is a D on one side, there is a 5 on the other".
Typically, 75 per cent of people pick the D and 5, reasoning that if these have a 5 and a D respectively on their flip sides, this confirms the rule. But look again. Although you are required to prove that if there is a D on one side, there is a 5 on the other, the statement says nothing about what letters might be on the reverse of a 5. So the 5 card is irrelevant. Instead of trying to confirm the theory, the way to test it is to try to disprove it. The correct answer is D (if the reverse isn't 5, the statement is false) and 2 (if there's a D on the other side, the statement is false).
The confirmation bias is a problem if we believe we are making a decision by rationally weighing up alternatives, when in fact we already have a favoured option that we simply want to justify. Our tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people's judgement is affected by the confirmation bias, while denying it in ourselves, makes matters worse (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 11, p 37).
If you want to make good choices, you need to do more than latch on to facts and figures that support the option you already suspect is the best. Admittedly, actively searching for evidence that could prove you wrong is a painful process, and requires self-discipline. That may be too much to ask of many people much of the time. "Perhaps it's enough to realise that we're unlikely to be truly objective," says psychologist Ray Nickerson at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. "Just recognising that this bias exists, and that we're all subject to it, is probably a good thing." At the very least, we might hold our views a little less dogmatically and choose with a bit more humility.
“Searching for evidence that could prove you wrong is a painful process”
5 Keep your eye on the ball
Our decisions and judgements have a strange and disconcerting habit of becoming attached to arbitrary or irrelevant facts and figures. In a classic study that introduced this so-called "anchoring effect", Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky asked participants to spin a "wheel of fortune" with numbers ranging from 0 to 100, and afterwards to estimate what percentage of United Nations countries were African. Unknown to the subjects, the wheel was rigged to stop at either 10 or 65. Although this had nothing to do with the subsequent question, the effect on people's answers was dramatic. On average, participants presented with a 10 on the wheel gave an estimate of 25 per cent, while the figure for those who got 65 was 45 per cent. It seems they had taken their cue from the spin of a wheel.
Anchoring is likely to kick in whenever we are required to make a decision based on very limited information. With little to go on, we seem more prone to latch onto irrelevancies and let them sway our judgement. It can also take a more concrete form, however. We are all in danger of falling foul of the anchoring effect every time we walk into a shop and see a nice shirt or dress marked "reduced". That's because the original price serves as an anchor against which we compare the discounted price, making it look like a bargain even if in absolute terms it is expensive.
What should you do if you think you are succumbing to the anchoring effect? "It is very hard to shake," admits psychologist Tom Gilovich of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. One strategy might be to create your own counterbalancing anchors, but even this has its problems. "You don't know how much you have been affected by an anchor, so it's hard to compensate for it," says Gilovich.
6 Don't cry over spilt milk
Does this sound familiar? You are at an expensive restaurant, the food is fantastic, but you've eaten so much you are starting to feel queasy. You know you should leave the rest of your dessert, but you feel compelled to polish it off despite a growing sense of nausea. Or what about this? At the back of your wardrobe lurks an ill-fitting and outdated item of clothing. It is taking up precious space but you cannot bring yourself to throw it away because you spent a fortune on it and you have hardly worn it.
The force behind both these bad decisions is called the sunk cost fallacy. In the 1980s, Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer from The Ohio State University demonstrated just how easily we can be duped by it. They got students to imagine that they had bought a weekend skiing trip to Michigan for $100, and then discovered an even cheaper deal to a better resort - $50 for a weekend in Wisconsin. Only after shelling out for both trips were the students told that they were on the same weekend. What would they do? Surprisingly, most opted for the less appealing but more expensive trip because of the greater cost already invested in it.
The reason behind this is the more we invest in something, the more commitment we feel towards it. The investment needn't be financial. Who hasn't persevered with a tedious book or an ill-judged friendship long after it would have been wise to cut their losses? Nobody is immune to the sunk cost fallacy. In the 1970s, the British and French governments fell for it when they continued investing heavily in the Concorde project well past the point when it became clear that developing the aircraft was not economically justifiable. Even stock-market traders are susceptible, often waiting far too long to ditch shares that are plummeting in price.
“The more we invest in something the more committed we feel to it”
To avoid letting sunk cost influence your decision-making, always remind yourself that the past is the past and what's spent is spent. We all hate to make a loss, but sometimes the wise option is to stop throwing good money after bad. "If at the time of considering whether to end a project you wouldn't initiate it, then it's probably not a good idea to continue," says Arkes.
7 Look at it another way
Consider this hypothetical situation. Your home town faces an outbreak of a disease that will kill 600 people if nothing is done. To combat it you can choose either programme A, which will save 200 people, or programme B, which has a one in three chance of saving 600 people but also a two in three chance of saving nobody. Which do you choose?
Now consider this situation. You are faced with the same disease and the same number of fatalities, but this time programme A will result in the certain death of 400 people, whereas programme B has a one in three chance of zero deaths and a two in three chance of 600 deaths.
You probably noticed that both situations are the same, and in terms of probability the outcome is identical whatever you pick. Yet most people instinctively go for A in the first scenario and B in the second. It is a classic case of the "framing effect", in which the choices we make are irrationally coloured by the way the alternatives are presented. In particular, we have a strong bias towards options that seem to involve gains, and an aversion to ones that seem to involve losses. That is why programme A appears better in the first scenario and programme B in the second. It also explains why healthy snacks tend to be marketed as "90 per cent fat free" rather than "10 per cent fat" and why we are more likely to buy anything from an idea to insurance if it is sold on its benefits alone.
At other times, the decisive framing factor is whether we see a choice as part of a bigger picture or as separate from previous decisions. Race-goers, for example, tend to consider each race as an individual betting opportunity, until the end of the day, when they see the final race as a chance to make up for their losses throughout the day. That explains the finding that punters are most likely to bet on an outsider in the final race.
In a study published last year, Benedetto De Martino and Ray Dolan from University College London used functional MRI to probe the brain's response to framing effects (Science, vol 313, p 660). In each round, volunteers were given a stake, say £50, and then told to choose between a sure-fire option, such as "keep £30" or "lose £20", or a gamble that would give them the same pay-off on average. When the fixed option was presented as a gain (keep £30), they gambled 43 per cent of the time. When it was presented as a loss (lose £20), they gambled 62 per cent of time. All were susceptible to this bias, although some far more so than others.
The brain scans showed that when a person went with the framing effect, there was lots of activity in their amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centre. De Martino was interested to find that people who were least susceptible had just as much activity in their amygdala. They were better able to suppress this initial emotional response, however, by drawing into play another part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex, which has strong connections to both the amygdala and parts of the brain involved in rational thought. De Martino notes that people with damage to this brain region tend to be more impulsive. "Imagine it as the thing that tunes the emotional response," he says.
Does that mean we can learn to recognise framing effects and ignore them? "I don't know," says De Martino, "but knowing that we have a bias is important." He believes this way of thinking probably evolved because it allows us to include subtle contextual information in decision-making. Unfortunately that sometimes leads to bad decisions in today's world, where we deal with more abstract concepts and statistical information. There is some evidence that experience and a better education can help counteract this, but even those of us most prone to the framing effect can take a simple measure to avoid it: look at your options from more than one angle.
8 Beware social pressure
You may think of yourself as a single-minded individual and not at all the kind of person to let others influence you, but the fact is that no one is immune to social pressure. Countless experiments have revealed that even the most normal, well-adjusted people can be swayed by figures of authority and their peers to make terrible decisions (New Scientist, 14 April, p 42).
In one classic study, Stanley Milgram of Yale University persuaded volunteers to administer electric shocks to someone behind a screen. It was a set-up, but the subjects didn't know that and on Milgram's insistence many continued upping the voltage until the recipient was apparently unconscious. In 1989, a similar deference to authority played a part in the death of 47 people, when a plane crashed into a motorway just short of East Midlands airport in the UK. One of the engines had caught fire shortly after take-off and the captain shut down the wrong one. A member of the cabin crew realised the error but decided not to question his authority.
The power of peer pressure can also lead to bad choices both inside and outside the lab. In 1971, an experiment at Stanford University in California famously had to be stopped when a group of ordinary students who had been assigned to act as prison guards started mentally abusing another group acting as prisoners. Since then studies have shown that groups of like-minded individuals tend to talk themselves into extreme positions, and that groups of peers are more likely to choose risky options than people acting alone. These effects help explain all sorts of choices we might think are unwise, from the dangerous antics of gangs of teenage boys to the radicalism of some animal-rights activists and cult members.
How can you avoid the malign influence of social pressure? First, if you suspect you are making a choice because you think it is what your boss would want, think again. If you are a member of a group or committee, never assume that the group knows best, and if you find everyone agreeing, play the contrarian. Finally, beware situations in which you feel you have little individual responsibility - that is when you are most likely to make irresponsible choices.
“If you find everyone in your group agreeing, play the contrarian”
Although there is no doubt that social pressure can adversely affect our judgement, there are occasions when it can be harnessed as a force for good. In a recent experiment researchers led by Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University in Tempe looked at ways to promote environmentally friendly choices. They placed cards in hotel rooms encouraging guests to reuse their towels either out of respect for the environment, for the sake of future generations, or because the majority of guests did so. Peer pressure turned out to be 30 per cent more effective than the other motivators.
9 Limit your options
You probably think that more choice is better than less - Starbucks certainly does - but consider these findings. People offered too many alternative ways to invest for their retirement become less likely to invest at all; and people get more pleasure from choosing a chocolate from a selection of five than when they pick the same sweet from a selection of 30.
These are two of the discoveries made by psychologist Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University, New York, who studies the paradox of choice - the idea that while we think more choice is best, often less is more. The problem is that greater choice usually comes at a price. It makes greater demands on your information-processing skills, and the process can be confusing, time-consuming and at worst can lead to paralysis: you spend so much time weighing up the alternatives that you end up doing nothing. In addition, more choice also increases the chances of your making a mistake, so you can end up feeling less satisfied with your choice because of a niggling fear that you have missed a better opportunity.
The paradox of choice applies to us all, but it hits some people harder than others. Worst affected are "maximisers" - people who seek the best they can get by examining all the possible options before they make up their mind. This strategy can work well when choice is limited, but flounders when things become too complex. "Satisficers" - people who tend to choose the first option that meets their preset threshold of requirements - suffer least. Psychologists believe this is the way most of us choose a romantic partner from among the millions of possible dates.
"If you're out to find 'good enough', a lot of the pressure is off and the task of choosing something in the sea of limitless choice becomes more manageable," says Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. When he investigated maximising and satisficing strategies among college leavers entering the job market, he found that although maximisers ended up in jobs with an average starting salary 20 per cent higher than satisficers, they were actually less satisfied. "By every psychological outcome we could measure they felt worse - they were more depressed, frustrated and anxious," says Schwartz.
Even when "good enough" is not objectively the best choice, it may be the one that makes you happiest. So instead of exhaustively trawling through the websites and catalogues in search of your ideal digital camera or garden barbecue, try asking a friend if they are happy with theirs. If they are, it will probably do for you too, says Schwartz. Even in situations when a choice seems too important to simply satisfice, you should try to limit the number of options you consider. "I think maximising really does people in when the choice set gets too large," says Schwartz.
10 Have someone else choose
We tend to believe that we will always be happier being in control than having someone else choose for us. Yet sometimes, no matter what the outcome of a decision, the actual process of making it can leave us feeling dissatisfied. Then it may be better to relinquish control.
Last year, Simona Botti from Cornell University and Ann McGill from the University of Chicago published a series of experiments that explore this idea (Journal of Consumer Research, vol 33, p 211). First they gave volunteers a list of four items, each of which was described by four attributes, and asked them to choose one. They were given either a pleasant choice between types of coffee or chocolate, or an unpleasant one between different bad smells. Once the choice was made they completed questionnaires to rate their levels of satisfaction with the outcome and to indicate how they felt about making the decision.
As you might expect, people given a choice of pleasant options tended to be very satisfied with the item they picked and happily took the credit for making a good decision. When the choice was between nasty options, though, dissatisfaction was rife: people did not like their choice, and what's more, they tended to blame themselves for ending up with something distasteful. It didn't even matter that this was the least bad option, they still felt bad about it. They would have been happier not to choose at all.
In a similar experiment, subjects had to choose without any information to guide them. This time they were all less satisfied than people who had simply been assigned an option. The reason, say the researchers, is that the choosers couldn't give themselves credit even if they ended up with a good option, yet still felt burdened by the thought that they might not have chosen the best alternative. Even when choosers had a little information - though not enough to feel responsible for the outcome - they felt no happier choosing than being chosen for.
Botti believes these findings have broad implications for any decision that is either trivial or distasteful. Try letting someone else choose the wine at a restaurant or a machine pick the numbers on your lottery ticket, for example. You might also feel happier about leaving some decisions to the state or a professional. Botti's latest work suggests that people prefer having a doctor make choices about which treatment they should have, or whether to remove life support from a seriously premature baby. "There is a fixation with choice, a belief that it brings happiness," she says. "Sometimes it doesn't."
Decisions, decisions! Our lives are full of them, from the small and mundane, such as what to wear or eat, to the life-changing, such as whether to get married and to whom, what job to take and how to bring up our children. We jealously guard our right to choose. It is central to our individuality: the very definition of free will. Yet sometimes we make bad decisions that leave us unhappy or full of regret. Can science help?
Making good decisions requires us to balance the seemingly antithetical forces of emotion and rationality. We must be able to predict the future, accurately perceive the present situation, have insight into the minds of others and deal with uncertainty.
Most of us are ignorant of the mental processes that lie behind our decisions, but this has become a hot topic for investigation, and luckily what psychologists and neurobiologists are finding may help us all make better choices. Here we bring together some of their many fascinating discoveries in the New Scientist guide to making up your mind.
1 Don't fear the consequences
Whether it's choosing between a long weekend in Paris or a trip to the ski slopes, a new car versus a bigger house, or even who to marry, almost every decision we make entails predicting the future. In each case we imagine how the outcomes of our choices will make us feel, and what the emotional or "hedonic" consequences of our actions will be. Sensibly, we usually plump for the option that we think will make us the happiest overall.
This "affective forecasting" is fine in theory. The only problem is that we are not very good at it. People routinely overestimate the impact of decision outcomes and life events, both good and bad. We tend to think that winning the lottery will make us happier than it actually will, and that life would be completely unbearable if we were to lose the use of our legs. "The hedonic consequences of most events are less intense and briefer than most people imagine," says psychologist Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University. This is as true for trivial events such as going to a great restaurant, as it is for major ones such as losing a job or a kidney.
A major factor leading us to make bad predictions is "loss aversion" - the belief that a loss will hurt more than a corresponding gain will please. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman from Princeton University has found, for instance, that most people are unwilling to accept a 50:50 bet unless the amount they could win is roughly twice the amount they might lose. So most people would only gamble £5 on the flip of a coin if they could win more than £10. Yet Gilbert and his colleagues have recently shown that while loss aversion affected people's choices, when they did lose they found it much less painful than they had anticipated (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 649). He puts this down to our unsung psychological resilience and our ability to rationalise almost any situation. "We're very good at finding new ways to see the world that make it a better place for us to live in," he says.
So what is a poor affective forecaster supposed to do? Rather than looking inwards and imagining how a given outcome might make you feel, try to find someone who has made the same decision or choice, and see how they felt. Remember also that whatever the future holds, it will probably hurt or please you less than you imagine. Finally, don't always play it safe. The worst might never happen - and if it does you have the psychological resilience to cope.
“Whatever the future holds it will hurt or please you less than you imagine”
2 Go with your gut instincts
It is tempting to think that to make good decisions you need time to systematically weigh up all the pros and cons of various alternatives, but sometimes a snap judgement or instinctive choice is just as good, if not better.
In our everyday lives, we make fast and competent decisions about who to trust and interact with. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov from Princeton University found that we make judgements about a person's trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, likeability and attractiveness within the first 100 milliseconds of seeing a new face. Given longer to look - up to 1 second - the researchers found observers hardly revised their views, they only became more confident in their snap decisions (Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592).
Of course, as you get to know someone better you refine your first impressions. It stands to reason that extra information can help you make well-informed, rational decisions. Yet paradoxically, sometimes the more information you have the better off you may be going with your instincts. Information overload can be a problem in all sorts of situations, from choosing a school for your child to picking a holiday destination. At times like these, you may be better off avoiding conscious deliberation and instead leave the decision to your unconscious brain, as research by Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands shows (Science, vol 311, p 1005).
They asked students to choose one of four hypothetical cars, based either on a simple list of four specifications such as mileage and legroom, or a longer list of 12 such features. Some subjects then got a few minutes to think about the alternatives before making their decision, while others had to spend that time solving anagrams. What Dijksterhuis found was that faced with a simple choice, subjects picked better cars if they could think things through. When confronted by a complex decision, however, they became bamboozled and actually made the best choices when they did not consciously analyse the options.
Dijksterhuis and his team found a similar pattern in the real world. When making simple purchases, such as clothes or kitchen accessories, shoppers were happier with their decisions a few weeks later if they had rationally weighed up the alternatives. For more complex purchases such as furniture, however, those who relied on their gut instinct ended up happier. The researchers conclude that this kind of unconscious decision-making can be successfully applied way beyond the shopping mall into areas including politics and management.
But before you throw away your lists of pros and cons, a word of caution. If the choice you face is highly emotive, your instincts may not serve you well. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Francisco this February, Joseph Arvai from Michigan State University in East Lansing described a study in which he and Robyn Wilson from The Ohio State University in Columbus asked people to consider two common risks in US state parks - crime and damage to property by white-tailed deer. When asked to decide which was most urgently in need of management, most people chose crime, even when it was doing far less damage than the deer. Arvai puts this down to the negative emotions that crime incites. "The emotional responses that are conjured up by problems like terrorism and crime are so strong that most people don't factor in the empirical evidence when making decisions," he says.
3 Consider your emotions
You might think that emotions are the enemy of decision-making, but in fact they are integral to it. Our most basic emotions evolved to enable us to make rapid and unconscious choices in situations that threaten our survival. Fear leads to flight or fight, disgust leads to avoidance. Yet the role of emotions in decision-making goes way deeper than these knee-jerk responses. Whenever you make up your mind, your limbic system - the brain's emotional centre - is active. Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has studied people with damage to only the emotional parts of their brains, and found that they were crippled by indecision, unable to make even the most basic choices, such as what to wear or eat. Damasio speculates that this may be because our brains store emotional memories of past choices, which we use to inform present decisions.
Emotions are clearly a crucial component in the neurobiology of choice, but whether they always allow us to make the right decisions is another matter. If you try to make choices under the influence of an emotion it can seriously affect the outcome.
Take anger. Daniel Fessler and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, induced anger in a group of subjects by getting them to write an essay recalling an experience that made them see red. They then got them to play a game in which they were presented with a simple choice: either take a guaranteed $15 payout, or gamble for more with the prospect of gaining nothing. The researchers found that men, but not women, gambled more when they were angry (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol 95, p 107).
In another experiment, Fessler and colleague Kevin Haley discovered that angry people were less generous in the ultimatum game - in which one person is given a sum of money and told to share it with an anonymous partner, who must accept the offer otherwise neither gets anything. A third study by Nitika Garg, Jeffrey Inman and Vikas Mittal from the University of Chicago found that angry consumers were more likely to opt for the first thing they were offered rather than considering other alternatives. It seems that anger can make us impetuous, selfish and risk-prone.
Disgust also has some interesting effects. "Disgust protects against contamination," says Fessler. "The initial response is information-gathering, followed by repulsion." That helps explain why in their gambling experiments, Fessler's team found that disgust leads to caution, particularly in women. Disgust also seems to make us more censorious in our moral judgements. Thalia Wheatley from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia, used hypnosis to induce disgust in response to arbitrary words, then asked people to rate the moral status of various actions, including incest between cousins, eating one's dog and bribery. In the most extreme example, people who had read a word that cued disgust went so far as to express moral censure of blameless Dan, a student councillor who was merely organising discussion meetings (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780).
All emotions affect our thinking and motivation, so it may be best to avoid making important decisions under their influence. Yet strangely there is one emotion that seems to help us make good choices. In their study, the Chicago researchers found that sad people took time to consider the various alternatives on offer, and ended up making the best choices. In fact many studies show that depressed people have the most realistic take on the world. Psychologists have even coined a name for it: depressive realism.
4 Play the devil's advocate
Have you ever had an argument with someone about a vexatious issue such as immigration or the death penalty and been frustrated because they only drew on evidence that supported their opinions and conveniently ignored anything to the contrary? This is the ubiquitous confirmation bias. It can be infuriating in others, but we are all susceptible every time we weigh up evidence to guide our decision-making.
If you doubt it, try this famous illustration of the confirmation bias called the Wason card selection task. Four cards are laid out each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. You can see D, A, 2 and 5 and must turn over those cards that will allow you to decide if the following statement is true: "If there is a D on one side, there is a 5 on the other".
Typically, 75 per cent of people pick the D and 5, reasoning that if these have a 5 and a D respectively on their flip sides, this confirms the rule. But look again. Although you are required to prove that if there is a D on one side, there is a 5 on the other, the statement says nothing about what letters might be on the reverse of a 5. So the 5 card is irrelevant. Instead of trying to confirm the theory, the way to test it is to try to disprove it. The correct answer is D (if the reverse isn't 5, the statement is false) and 2 (if there's a D on the other side, the statement is false).
The confirmation bias is a problem if we believe we are making a decision by rationally weighing up alternatives, when in fact we already have a favoured option that we simply want to justify. Our tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people's judgement is affected by the confirmation bias, while denying it in ourselves, makes matters worse (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 11, p 37).
If you want to make good choices, you need to do more than latch on to facts and figures that support the option you already suspect is the best. Admittedly, actively searching for evidence that could prove you wrong is a painful process, and requires self-discipline. That may be too much to ask of many people much of the time. "Perhaps it's enough to realise that we're unlikely to be truly objective," says psychologist Ray Nickerson at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. "Just recognising that this bias exists, and that we're all subject to it, is probably a good thing." At the very least, we might hold our views a little less dogmatically and choose with a bit more humility.
“Searching for evidence that could prove you wrong is a painful process”
5 Keep your eye on the ball
Our decisions and judgements have a strange and disconcerting habit of becoming attached to arbitrary or irrelevant facts and figures. In a classic study that introduced this so-called "anchoring effect", Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky asked participants to spin a "wheel of fortune" with numbers ranging from 0 to 100, and afterwards to estimate what percentage of United Nations countries were African. Unknown to the subjects, the wheel was rigged to stop at either 10 or 65. Although this had nothing to do with the subsequent question, the effect on people's answers was dramatic. On average, participants presented with a 10 on the wheel gave an estimate of 25 per cent, while the figure for those who got 65 was 45 per cent. It seems they had taken their cue from the spin of a wheel.
Anchoring is likely to kick in whenever we are required to make a decision based on very limited information. With little to go on, we seem more prone to latch onto irrelevancies and let them sway our judgement. It can also take a more concrete form, however. We are all in danger of falling foul of the anchoring effect every time we walk into a shop and see a nice shirt or dress marked "reduced". That's because the original price serves as an anchor against which we compare the discounted price, making it look like a bargain even if in absolute terms it is expensive.
What should you do if you think you are succumbing to the anchoring effect? "It is very hard to shake," admits psychologist Tom Gilovich of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. One strategy might be to create your own counterbalancing anchors, but even this has its problems. "You don't know how much you have been affected by an anchor, so it's hard to compensate for it," says Gilovich.
6 Don't cry over spilt milk
Does this sound familiar? You are at an expensive restaurant, the food is fantastic, but you've eaten so much you are starting to feel queasy. You know you should leave the rest of your dessert, but you feel compelled to polish it off despite a growing sense of nausea. Or what about this? At the back of your wardrobe lurks an ill-fitting and outdated item of clothing. It is taking up precious space but you cannot bring yourself to throw it away because you spent a fortune on it and you have hardly worn it.
The force behind both these bad decisions is called the sunk cost fallacy. In the 1980s, Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer from The Ohio State University demonstrated just how easily we can be duped by it. They got students to imagine that they had bought a weekend skiing trip to Michigan for $100, and then discovered an even cheaper deal to a better resort - $50 for a weekend in Wisconsin. Only after shelling out for both trips were the students told that they were on the same weekend. What would they do? Surprisingly, most opted for the less appealing but more expensive trip because of the greater cost already invested in it.
The reason behind this is the more we invest in something, the more commitment we feel towards it. The investment needn't be financial. Who hasn't persevered with a tedious book or an ill-judged friendship long after it would have been wise to cut their losses? Nobody is immune to the sunk cost fallacy. In the 1970s, the British and French governments fell for it when they continued investing heavily in the Concorde project well past the point when it became clear that developing the aircraft was not economically justifiable. Even stock-market traders are susceptible, often waiting far too long to ditch shares that are plummeting in price.
“The more we invest in something the more committed we feel to it”
To avoid letting sunk cost influence your decision-making, always remind yourself that the past is the past and what's spent is spent. We all hate to make a loss, but sometimes the wise option is to stop throwing good money after bad. "If at the time of considering whether to end a project you wouldn't initiate it, then it's probably not a good idea to continue," says Arkes.
7 Look at it another way
Consider this hypothetical situation. Your home town faces an outbreak of a disease that will kill 600 people if nothing is done. To combat it you can choose either programme A, which will save 200 people, or programme B, which has a one in three chance of saving 600 people but also a two in three chance of saving nobody. Which do you choose?
Now consider this situation. You are faced with the same disease and the same number of fatalities, but this time programme A will result in the certain death of 400 people, whereas programme B has a one in three chance of zero deaths and a two in three chance of 600 deaths.
You probably noticed that both situations are the same, and in terms of probability the outcome is identical whatever you pick. Yet most people instinctively go for A in the first scenario and B in the second. It is a classic case of the "framing effect", in which the choices we make are irrationally coloured by the way the alternatives are presented. In particular, we have a strong bias towards options that seem to involve gains, and an aversion to ones that seem to involve losses. That is why programme A appears better in the first scenario and programme B in the second. It also explains why healthy snacks tend to be marketed as "90 per cent fat free" rather than "10 per cent fat" and why we are more likely to buy anything from an idea to insurance if it is sold on its benefits alone.
At other times, the decisive framing factor is whether we see a choice as part of a bigger picture or as separate from previous decisions. Race-goers, for example, tend to consider each race as an individual betting opportunity, until the end of the day, when they see the final race as a chance to make up for their losses throughout the day. That explains the finding that punters are most likely to bet on an outsider in the final race.
In a study published last year, Benedetto De Martino and Ray Dolan from University College London used functional MRI to probe the brain's response to framing effects (Science, vol 313, p 660). In each round, volunteers were given a stake, say £50, and then told to choose between a sure-fire option, such as "keep £30" or "lose £20", or a gamble that would give them the same pay-off on average. When the fixed option was presented as a gain (keep £30), they gambled 43 per cent of the time. When it was presented as a loss (lose £20), they gambled 62 per cent of time. All were susceptible to this bias, although some far more so than others.
The brain scans showed that when a person went with the framing effect, there was lots of activity in their amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centre. De Martino was interested to find that people who were least susceptible had just as much activity in their amygdala. They were better able to suppress this initial emotional response, however, by drawing into play another part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex, which has strong connections to both the amygdala and parts of the brain involved in rational thought. De Martino notes that people with damage to this brain region tend to be more impulsive. "Imagine it as the thing that tunes the emotional response," he says.
Does that mean we can learn to recognise framing effects and ignore them? "I don't know," says De Martino, "but knowing that we have a bias is important." He believes this way of thinking probably evolved because it allows us to include subtle contextual information in decision-making. Unfortunately that sometimes leads to bad decisions in today's world, where we deal with more abstract concepts and statistical information. There is some evidence that experience and a better education can help counteract this, but even those of us most prone to the framing effect can take a simple measure to avoid it: look at your options from more than one angle.
8 Beware social pressure
You may think of yourself as a single-minded individual and not at all the kind of person to let others influence you, but the fact is that no one is immune to social pressure. Countless experiments have revealed that even the most normal, well-adjusted people can be swayed by figures of authority and their peers to make terrible decisions (New Scientist, 14 April, p 42).
In one classic study, Stanley Milgram of Yale University persuaded volunteers to administer electric shocks to someone behind a screen. It was a set-up, but the subjects didn't know that and on Milgram's insistence many continued upping the voltage until the recipient was apparently unconscious. In 1989, a similar deference to authority played a part in the death of 47 people, when a plane crashed into a motorway just short of East Midlands airport in the UK. One of the engines had caught fire shortly after take-off and the captain shut down the wrong one. A member of the cabin crew realised the error but decided not to question his authority.
The power of peer pressure can also lead to bad choices both inside and outside the lab. In 1971, an experiment at Stanford University in California famously had to be stopped when a group of ordinary students who had been assigned to act as prison guards started mentally abusing another group acting as prisoners. Since then studies have shown that groups of like-minded individuals tend to talk themselves into extreme positions, and that groups of peers are more likely to choose risky options than people acting alone. These effects help explain all sorts of choices we might think are unwise, from the dangerous antics of gangs of teenage boys to the radicalism of some animal-rights activists and cult members.
How can you avoid the malign influence of social pressure? First, if you suspect you are making a choice because you think it is what your boss would want, think again. If you are a member of a group or committee, never assume that the group knows best, and if you find everyone agreeing, play the contrarian. Finally, beware situations in which you feel you have little individual responsibility - that is when you are most likely to make irresponsible choices.
“If you find everyone in your group agreeing, play the contrarian”
Although there is no doubt that social pressure can adversely affect our judgement, there are occasions when it can be harnessed as a force for good. In a recent experiment researchers led by Robert Cialdini of Arizona State University in Tempe looked at ways to promote environmentally friendly choices. They placed cards in hotel rooms encouraging guests to reuse their towels either out of respect for the environment, for the sake of future generations, or because the majority of guests did so. Peer pressure turned out to be 30 per cent more effective than the other motivators.
9 Limit your options
You probably think that more choice is better than less - Starbucks certainly does - but consider these findings. People offered too many alternative ways to invest for their retirement become less likely to invest at all; and people get more pleasure from choosing a chocolate from a selection of five than when they pick the same sweet from a selection of 30.
These are two of the discoveries made by psychologist Sheena Iyengar from Columbia University, New York, who studies the paradox of choice - the idea that while we think more choice is best, often less is more. The problem is that greater choice usually comes at a price. It makes greater demands on your information-processing skills, and the process can be confusing, time-consuming and at worst can lead to paralysis: you spend so much time weighing up the alternatives that you end up doing nothing. In addition, more choice also increases the chances of your making a mistake, so you can end up feeling less satisfied with your choice because of a niggling fear that you have missed a better opportunity.
The paradox of choice applies to us all, but it hits some people harder than others. Worst affected are "maximisers" - people who seek the best they can get by examining all the possible options before they make up their mind. This strategy can work well when choice is limited, but flounders when things become too complex. "Satisficers" - people who tend to choose the first option that meets their preset threshold of requirements - suffer least. Psychologists believe this is the way most of us choose a romantic partner from among the millions of possible dates.
"If you're out to find 'good enough', a lot of the pressure is off and the task of choosing something in the sea of limitless choice becomes more manageable," says Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. When he investigated maximising and satisficing strategies among college leavers entering the job market, he found that although maximisers ended up in jobs with an average starting salary 20 per cent higher than satisficers, they were actually less satisfied. "By every psychological outcome we could measure they felt worse - they were more depressed, frustrated and anxious," says Schwartz.
Even when "good enough" is not objectively the best choice, it may be the one that makes you happiest. So instead of exhaustively trawling through the websites and catalogues in search of your ideal digital camera or garden barbecue, try asking a friend if they are happy with theirs. If they are, it will probably do for you too, says Schwartz. Even in situations when a choice seems too important to simply satisfice, you should try to limit the number of options you consider. "I think maximising really does people in when the choice set gets too large," says Schwartz.
10 Have someone else choose
We tend to believe that we will always be happier being in control than having someone else choose for us. Yet sometimes, no matter what the outcome of a decision, the actual process of making it can leave us feeling dissatisfied. Then it may be better to relinquish control.
Last year, Simona Botti from Cornell University and Ann McGill from the University of Chicago published a series of experiments that explore this idea (Journal of Consumer Research, vol 33, p 211). First they gave volunteers a list of four items, each of which was described by four attributes, and asked them to choose one. They were given either a pleasant choice between types of coffee or chocolate, or an unpleasant one between different bad smells. Once the choice was made they completed questionnaires to rate their levels of satisfaction with the outcome and to indicate how they felt about making the decision.
As you might expect, people given a choice of pleasant options tended to be very satisfied with the item they picked and happily took the credit for making a good decision. When the choice was between nasty options, though, dissatisfaction was rife: people did not like their choice, and what's more, they tended to blame themselves for ending up with something distasteful. It didn't even matter that this was the least bad option, they still felt bad about it. They would have been happier not to choose at all.
In a similar experiment, subjects had to choose without any information to guide them. This time they were all less satisfied than people who had simply been assigned an option. The reason, say the researchers, is that the choosers couldn't give themselves credit even if they ended up with a good option, yet still felt burdened by the thought that they might not have chosen the best alternative. Even when choosers had a little information - though not enough to feel responsible for the outcome - they felt no happier choosing than being chosen for.
Botti believes these findings have broad implications for any decision that is either trivial or distasteful. Try letting someone else choose the wine at a restaurant or a machine pick the numbers on your lottery ticket, for example. You might also feel happier about leaving some decisions to the state or a professional. Botti's latest work suggests that people prefer having a doctor make choices about which treatment they should have, or whether to remove life support from a seriously premature baby. "There is a fixation with choice, a belief that it brings happiness," she says. "Sometimes it doesn't."
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